31 ms·

Neural nets are not “slightly conscious,” and AI PR can do with less hype

253 points by andreyk 5y ago

andygroundwater 5y ago
It's stretching credulity beyond the usual exaggerated hype associated with AI. What we have now is semi-OK forecasting at scale, nothing more. We (as in the researches, platform and technology) can get a system to select what looks to be a valid response to a host of stimuli, e.g., chess moves, patient diagnostics, vehicle driving etc. None of this "thinks for itself", nor is it remotely near to such levels of conscious self-awareness. I'm sick of this hype, it's been going on since the 1905's with hucksters promising robot household domestics, and all sorts of kooky weirdness that was swallowed up by the popular media.
- csee 5y ago
  The people who say it might be slightly conscious are just appealing to a functional, substrate-independent requirement for consciousness. I happen to agree with them that it's feasible and plausible. Let me ask you. If we invented an AGI that was as smart as us based on much larger nets (perhaps with one or two algorithmic tweaks on current approaches) trained on much more data, running on commodity hardware, would it be conscious? If yes, why can't our current nets be slightly conscious?
  - new_guy 5y ago
    'slightly conscious' is just word salad, it doesn't actually mean anything.
    - csee 5y ago
      I am slightly conscious when I am extremely drunk and can barely think and feel, but yet still have some modicum of conscious experience. That's what it means. If you don't agree that consciousness exists on a spectrum, and instead think that something is either conscious or not, then simply replace the words 'slightly conscious' with 'conscious'.
      - tedunangst 5y ago
        But why would I want to put an extremely drunk computer in charge of making decisions?
        csee 5y ago
        I was attempting to give an example of what a 'slightly conscious' state is to show that it isn't completely incoherent. Admittedly it was far from rigorous.
        RHSman2 5y ago
        By far the best comment on here.
    - bondarchuk 5y ago
      You could say the same about "conscious" in general. There's not a single coherent definition of the word, not even in academic debates.
      - csee 5y ago
        There isn't, but the response to this lack of definition shouldn't be to simply terminate the discussion. We know it's probably a real thing because we experience it, and it's an extremely important open question whether an AGI on hardware will have "it" too. The answer to the question will have large ethical implications a few decades into the future. If they can suffer just like animals can, we really need to know that so we don't accidentally create a large amount of suffering. If they can't suffer, just like rocks probably can't, this doesn't have to be a concern of ours.
        grumbel 5y ago
        The response to the lack of definition should be investigation into how that definition could look like, not arguing if we or something else has it or not. Without a definition and criteria to test you're never going to make progress.
        csee 5y ago
        Philosophers have been trying for decades to define it rigorously and have failed decisively. It really looks intractable at the moment. Given we are in this quagmire, I think it is ok to explore/discuss a bit further despite the shaky foundations of only having fuzzy definitions of "qualia" or "consciousness" to rely on.
        mannykannot 5y ago
        Quite a lot of the philosophical debate has been tied up in the effort to show that minds cannot be the result of purely physical processes or will never be explained as such, which does not tell us anything about what they are. We are not going to be able to say with any great precision what we are trying to say with the word 'consciousness' until we have more information. In lieu of that, what we can do is say what phenomena seem to be in need of explanations before we can compile a definition. At this point, opinions that human-level consciousness is either just more of what has been done so far, or cannot possibly be just that, are just opinions.
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    There’s no evidence that neural nets can form an AGI so it’s a moot point. The AGI is an I’ll defined inflection point.
    - Galaxeblaffer 5y ago
      I'd consider brains and other biological neutral systems as neutral nets. So to me there's pretty convincing evidence that neutral nets can form an AGI
      - oneoff786 5y ago
        Well you shouldn’t. They are not the same. Brains are not (ML) neural networks. Neural networks are just a mathematical approximation of one part of how the mind works
        Galaxeblaffer 5y ago
        I never ever said that the tiny approximation of subsets of our brain was enough for AGI. Just because we haven't found out the exact structures of the neural net in our brain and how to emulate it, it's still very much a neural net. It's just bigger and more complex than anything we can make our emulate yet.
chasing 5y ago
There are actual living things we have difficulty proving are "conscious" and you get into really tricky territory trying to establish what might be "conscious" (or even "alive") in the world even without bringing AI into the mix. Even the people around us we can't prove to be conscious except in that we are also human and assume they have a similar first-person (subjective) view of the world and aren't just a biological robot running equations. Yes, you could literally be the only conscious being in the universe and the universe would indistinguishable from one with many consciousnesses.
- igorkraw 5y ago
  Edit:Shoot, I meant to reply to another comment. Leaving this here and linking it --- IIT is the most coherent definition of consciousness I'm aware of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor... People dismiss it often, and it has valid academic criticisms, but most "lay" critiques I've seen seem to dismiss it because it gives things they don't consider to be "conscious like them" consciousness. I think in general, we overexagerate qualities that humans have as uniquely special and important (intelligence, sentience, consciousness), even if the definition of them is fuzzy and any non-fuzzy definition is "too inclusive". I wonder if this is because we are collectively Identity building and creating an "other" out of nature, because otherwise we'd 1. Be much less special as we want to fee 2. Would have to consider a lot of inconvenient externalities for our reasoning (moral and otherwise) to be consistent And both are slowdowns when you are bootstrapping a post scarcity society out of scarcity, so it'd culturally valuable to reify special qualities that we just determine "we" possess and "they" don't - because it's easier to unify on and allows more actions than making sure everyone can deal with the unfiltered reality of human... unremarkableness in an uncaring world, another social species like so many other with a temporary oligarchy on the planet (without wanting to drone to philosophically, I do think this aspect of Weltschmerz is underappreciated, especially seeing the anxiety amongst my peer group when the topic comes up)
  - mannykannot 5y ago
    You have acknowledged that there are valid academic criticisms of IIT, and for those wanting to get an idea of what those might be, a good place to start is with Scott Aaronson's responses in his blog: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 Note that the issue that you are concerned with here and the usefulness of IIT are separate concerns, and critics like Aaronson are not taking that position on the basis of the attitudes you claim are behind many 'lay' critiques.
bondarchuk 5y ago
I don't think "conscious" as a binary or scalar variable will ever be a coherent concept. "Raw" consciousness without content has never been demonstrated or even sensibly theorized. At the very least, we should add another term, that which the entity is conscious of. Then, I don't see why you would so vehemently deny that an image recognition net is conscious of the images it recognizes. Last I heard lobsters are supposed to be conscious and they only have about 100k neurons.
user3939382 5y ago
It's not just PR it's entire companies. I had a job interview with a guy who wanted me to do sales for his ML company and was bragging he had "AI" to predict who was going to win the Academy Awards. He had con-vinced someone with deep pockets that was going to work. If you go look at tech jobs on LinkedIn you see countless new companies with similar mud foundations that are somehow raising capital.
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  I believe the good experts are already distancing themselves from the AI term. It will backfire and will go out of fashion once again. There are important tools and skills in this space, but "AI" has been used more for deception than for clarity.
bonoboTP 5y ago
The whole discussion is pure fluff and a Twitter box match. You'll do yourself a favor by keeping all this noise out and concentrate on actually valuable books and writings. Any doofus and their cat can have an opinion on whether machines are conscious. We've been having this debate since Turing and even earlier. Also any time a Twitter storm comes up around AI, you will predictably have certain blocks building and flinging excrement at each other for various latent political disagreements. For Sutskever, it's a way to get into the news cycle, to get lots of engagement. Do you want to reward these? It's like Musk tweets. You can probably have more "impact" with a well optimized two-line off-hand tweet than with an actual book where you explain some novel idea.
- visarga 5y ago
  > Any doofus and their cat can have an opinion on whether machines are conscious. Please try a little bit to read the source before commenting. The originator of this opinion is Ilya Sutskever, co-founder at OpenAI and cited 269k times. He's one of the top people in the field. https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1491554478243258368 https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1491554478243258368 I take Ilya's tweet more like a musing, an invitation to think what if, rattling the box to get interesting reactions. In my opinion he's not necessarily right or wrong. Today's large neural networks might be conscious if they didn't lack some special equipment - a body, senses and action organs, and a goal. They need to be able to do causal interventions in the environment, not just reply to simple text inputs. I think embodiment is not out of reach. Look at Yann LeCun's strong reply: > Nope. Not even for true for small values of "slightly conscious" and large values of "large neural nets". I think you would need a particular kind of macro-architecture that none of the current networks possess. https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1492604977260412928 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1492604977260412928 The neural nets need the 4Es of cognition: embodied, embedded, enacted and extended. > The four E’s of 4E cognition initialize its central claim: cognition does not occur exclusively inside the head, but is variously embodied , embedded, enacted, or extended by way of extra cranial processes and structures... they constitute a form of dynamic coupling, where the brain body world interaction links the three parts into an autonomous, self regulating system. (MJ Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology)
theferalrobot 5y ago
I feel like everyone taking a hardline stance on this is being disingenuous - consciousness as it is used in pop culture is a largely non-scientific (and in my opinion a useless) term. If you claim 'consciousness' is just an emergent phenomena of complexity (something I happen to agree with) then sure neural nets are potentially slightly conscious, but that isn't how most people view consciousness unfortunately. Most people view 'consciousness' as some 'pie in the sky' component of biological life that has yet to be discovered by science, but this line of inquiry is completely outside the realm of useful dialog, so it seems pointless to debate such things. These are the two general views of consciousness, the first at least provides a useful framework for discussion, but the two camps will vehemently always disagree with each other. > "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra
- igorkraw 5y ago
  I meant to reply to this comment since IIT is the main coherent treatment I've seen+my thoughts about why people habe this pie in the sky tendency https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30409369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30409369
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fsckboy 5y ago
  "I think consciousness is just emergent from complexity, so what I have to say is valid, but people who suspect that's not the full story, well that's pointless to debate, they should use my framework for discussion" sheesh. weak.
  - jjcon 5y ago
    It is pointless to debate with someone that invokes ideas outside the realm of scientific inquiry... that is definitionally true isn't it?
    - 5y ago
defenestration 5y ago
You can argue that consciousness has an important role in evolution. That creatures which are aware of their own existence have a greater chance of reproduction and survival. What if we create an AI and give it the goal of maximum reproduction, would it be more effective if it can 'think' about itself?
Veedrac 5y ago
So this article does not actually defend its claim, it just gets mad that some AI researcher expressed their opinion, makes an unsourced (albeit probably correct) claim that the criticized opinion is a minority position, and wishes really strongly that people would be less excited about this thing that they are not as excited about. Meanwhile in academic philosophy, it's totally OK to conjecture that, say, subatomic particles are ‘slightly conscious’ and nobody tries to tell them that they are not allowed to have an opinion. Here's a hint, if you want to refute an idea, refute the actual idea, don't just tell the person in so many words that they don't have the social status to say it. Yes this post wound me up a bit, how could you tell?
- andreyk 5y ago
  hmm, I am not sure this is a fair assessment, the portion on "Experts largely agree that current forms of AI are not conscious, in any sense of the word. " provides sources and a brief argument. Sure it's not a super long defense of the stance, but then again this is mostly an overview of what happened with all this twitter drama and not a full argument about this topic. Also, it outright states "Granted, the claim could also be reasonable, if a particular definition of consciousness was specified as well."
  - jeffparsons 5y ago
    > "Experts largely agree that current forms of AI are not conscious, in any sense of the word." Experts in what? There _are_ no experts in consciousness, at least in the lay sense.
    - OneLeggedCat 5y ago
      Looks like you are getting downvoted, but it's true. Defining exactly what it is to be "conscious" is a nearly impossible problem to solve, even having spent your life studying it. I'm not personally even convinced that "cogito, ergo sum" is even correct.
      - 5y ago
danaris 5y ago
To be "conscious" in the sense that we generally understand it, any AI would need, at minimum, two things that are not commonly part of it. First, it needs to be continuously active and taking data input. Second, and closely related, it needs to be continuously learning. The neural nets we use today, in the main, are trained in one big lump, then fed discrete chunks of data to process. The neural nets themselves exist simply as static data on a disk somewhere. Some, I believe, have multiple training stages, but that's not at all the same thing as true continuity. I'm sure there are other aspects to being conscious, but I suspect that some of them, at least, are emergent behaviours, and I further suspect that they are mostly or all dependent upon these two.
- The_rationalist 5y ago
  [dead]
belval 5y ago
This is part of Microsoft and OpenAI marketing/branding strategy. Similar wording was used during the acquisition when OpenAI used "pre-AGI" in their press release: > Instead, we intend to license some of our pre-AGI technologies, with Microsoft becoming our preferred partner for commercializing them.* It's mostly arguing about semantics and it's fine and common in research circles. Sam Altman is pretty out of line with his comment saying LeCun lacks vision because he doesn't adhere to their hype (my opinion) based wording. Aside from that it's just business as usual, no need to stop every time academics argue. https://openai.com/blog/microsoft/?utm_source=angellist https://openai.com/blog/microsoft/?utm_source=angellist
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  In self-driving, I believe the Levels 1-5 helped define what people actually mean. I wonder if we could come up with such level definitions for AGI.
  - kfarr 5y ago
    Yes, and perhaps analogous, the self driving levels help regulators, press, and general public differentiate between marketing puffery and substance.
  - anonymoushn 5y ago
    The levels are helpful, but you still get companies saying they are "building a level 5 autonomous vehicle" and then telling you it only works in their geofence.
DantesKite 5y ago
The original tweet was very innocuous and seemed more like a thought experiment than a proclamation. Furthermore, nobody has come up with any conclusive evidence that the statement is incorrect. It's possible neural networks are slightly conscious, because we fundamentally do not understand what consciousness entails. If anybody can prove that statement is wrong, Nobel Prize to them.
- bogwog 5y ago
  > Furthermore, nobody has come up with any conclusive evidence that the statement is incorrect What would such evidence even look like?
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    I think we can all agree that we don't know. The point isn't that the statement's probably correct or presumptively correct - it's that the original tweet wasn't intended as a statement of fact in the first place. "Accurate science communication" can't mean that researchers are required to formulate all their hypotheses in secret where nobody in the media might hear them.
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  You should consider the fact that the person who tweeted it works at a for-profit company, and this tweet is generating a lot of publicity for the company (case in point, us being here around the top of HN). It's naive to think it's just some innocuous random thought.
  - DantesKite 5y ago
    The Oxford dictionary defines "innocuous" as "not harmful" or "offensive". In what way was his tweet harmful or offensive? Please be specific in your rebuttal. Here it is for posterity: "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious".
    - odonnellryan 5y ago
xiphias2 5y ago
AI researchers with huge salaries at huge companies are incentivized to hype what tasks machine learning can do while underestimating how centralized power it gives to the companies that have the infrastructure to train huge NNs. It doesn’t matter whether AI is conscious or not, only whether it’s centralizing or decentralizing power as it gets more powerful than human thinking (even if it’s not conscious).
skilled 5y ago
I mean, whatever the comments say here, it doesn't change the fact that news outlets pick up these kind of tweets and proclaim them as gospel.
jowday 5y ago
Discussions of “Consciousness” in the context of ML or AI research always seem to devolve into navel-gazing futurist pseudointellectualism. I don’t think it’s possible to have a meaningful conversation about something as ill defined as consciousness. This isn’t to malign the OpenAI researcher behind the original tweet - I just feel that AI researchers bringing up consciousnesses is a good signal to tune the conversation out. Bonus points if psychedelics are somehow brought up.
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  > Discussions of “Consciousness” in the context of ML or AI research always seem to devolve into navel-gazing futurist pseudointellectualism. it’s a hard problem. it’s been the realm of philosophy for a good deal of time; neuroscience sometimes touches it; then AI came rushing out of the blue and the question became about a hundred times more relevant. if you are strictly concerned with only your own well-being, you’re fine to ignore it. if you’re concerned with your pet cat’s well-being, even after seeing first-hand how differently they navigate the world, and their much more limited goals/volition, etc, then maybe there’s something worth digging into here: why concern yourself with the well-being of one biological machine but not of the well-being of the non-biological machine, especially as they converge in complexity over time? is there a justification for that, beyond just “it’s hard”?
burtonator 5y ago
dificilis 5y ago
"Conscious" is a word that has no objective scientific definition. It follows that "slightly conscious" is not well defined. In practice "conscious" just means "anything that thinks and makes decisions like I do". Also, nobody actually understands how their own brain works when they are thinking and deciding, which makes it very difficult for anyone to determine if some particular AI software thinks and decides the same way that their brain does those things.
- xvilka 5y ago
  Precisely! We cannot understand what consciousness is until we gain complete understanding of the human brain. Until that, we will have no AGI. Given the sheer complexity of the task, unlikely it will happen in this century.
  - nnx 5y ago
    Don't think we can assume complete understanding of the human brain is a strict dependency. The first AGI might look and function nothing like a biological brain, perhaps not even inspired from biological brains, or very loosely. Like airplanes do not look and function like birds.
akomtu 5y ago
On this tired topic of origins of consciousness, I've heard an interesting statement that consciousness arises from life interacting with matter. Life by itself, an abstract life, wouldn't be able to do much or interact with anything. Matter by itself would be an amorphous substance sliding down to the lowest energy state possible. But when life interacts with matter, it sees itself in the mirror and consciousness arises.
antognini 5y ago
I highly encourage anyone who is interested in the subject to listen through John Searle's lectures on the philosophy of mind [1]. He taught a course at UC Berkeley on the subject for many years, and one of the years was recorded and uploaded to Youtube. He walks through the history of the subject from Descartes onward and spends a lot of time about how philosophers got very excited during the 1960s and 70s as computer science was just taking off because it seemed that at long last we had a new way to explain consciousness. This idea is that the brain is just a kind of computer and consciousness is just doing a certain kind of computation. If we wrote the right program and ran it on a sufficiently powerful computer, we could make other kind of computers conscious as well. But Searle is most famous for the Chinese Room thought experiment which is (in my opinion) a fairly decisive counterargument against this position. That, along with the What Mary Knew thought experiment and Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat together made the "consciousness is computation" position increasingly untenable. It took about 40 years, but by the time these lectures were recorded it seems that the tide has really turned among philosophers of mind (Searle has his own biases but he tries to be impartial in explaining all sides). At least among philosophers who specialize in the subject it's hard to find many who seriously believe that a GPU running Resnet is conscious. Obviously there's a whole semester's worth of material in those lectures and the arguments can't really be summed up in an HN comment, but anyone who is interested in thinking about these questions should really give the whole course a listen. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi7Va_4ekko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi7Va_4ekko
- PartiallyTyped 5y ago
  A Resnet is not conscious, but one could argue that an RL agent, by some definitions of consciousness, is conscious. If the measure of consciousness is the ability to have a subjective experience, then that requires that the object has an internal state that is modified, thus the same experience in different agents results in different modifications, ergo, it is subjective. If a requirement for conscious experience is the capacity for self reference, then Hofstadter has already argued that that can be achieved with very simple rules of inference and natural numbers. An RL agent that can plan ahead and take into consideration its own internal state could be argued to be conscious, by even stricter means that require that the agent is aware of its own existence. To me, it looks as if humanity is trying to find ways to argue that it is anything but meatware. But I guess accepting that we are just computational units implies that agency is not a thing, and humanity isn't ready for this conversation.
nonrandomstring 5y ago
Almost every post here explicitly distinguishes "Artificial Intelligence" from machine learning and advanced statistics, or at least avoids clumsily confusing the puff of marketing with what we really do as computer scientists. We all know better here, right? So why don't we robustly challenge it? As with the word "hacker" - which we've somewhat reclaimed - the fact that a misuse has entered common circulation is not sufficient reason to shrug and accept. Next time a marketing, media or recruitment type uses the words "AI". please take a moment and a little courage to politely correct them. If "AI" stays in Hollywood where it belongs it'll help ensure these emotive brouhahas are less common and we can get on with creating actual social value from code.
- ipsum2 5y ago
  There's no point in fighting linguistic drift. Language changes to be more imprecise over time as laymen pick up terminology and use it in a broader sense than initially defined.
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  Unfortunately, funding is often tied to playing into it a little. It's unfortunate, and a good balance must be found, but that's how it is. You see it in academia as more and more AI institutes pop up and AI master's degree programs are offered. This is no new phenomenon, though. You can read up on why Dynamic Programming and Linear Programming got called like that. Because "programming" was hot then, but optimization wasn't. And "dynamic" is a cool sounding word. That's all. Anyone who needs funding (whether in academia, in a startup, as a job seeker, or a promotion-seeker) needs to sell themselves. And some terms work, and those who are willing to use them will win. Again, a reasonable compromise must be found, but just like in sales, simply being a very honest vacuum cleaner salesman won't be a good strategy.
j45 5y ago
Another building issue is the disingenuous blurred use of concepts like AI to describe things that clearly aren't or don't need to be AI... I wonder if the early AI hype now might negatively affect crossing the chasm for future generations of AI that will be much more be the real deal.
The_rationalist 5y ago
spion 5y ago
This only shows that the social network + MSM combo is really out of control
an-allen 5y ago
Neural Networks are nothing but math. Zeros and ones manipulated by a CPU. There is nothing remotely conscious here. They are literally the product of linear algebra. If neural networks are even slightly conscious then that means every linear algebra equation is “slightly conscious”.
- kfarr 5y ago
  Human brains are nothing but atoms. Particles and energies manipulated by physics. There is nothing remotely conscious here. They are literally the product of a deterministic universe.
  - grzm 5y ago
    Consciousness and free will are not the same concept.
- tiborsaas 5y ago
  Don't confuse the vehicle with the passenger. They are both heading towards same direction, but they are very different things.
zxcvbn4038 5y ago
AI is way overhyped, our current machine learning results in parlor tricks at best. My car still can’t drive itself. Microsoft is still waiting for a compiler that can make their code better. Google is still waiting for an AI to answer the phone. Facebook is still trying to teach Zuckerberg emotions. Youtube’s MI still deletes some poor person’s channel every week for no discernible reason. But we shouldn’t feel bad, didn’t it take the daleks three million years to conquer stairs?
wallacoloo 5y ago
> Experts largely agree that current forms of AI are not conscious, in any sense of the word. While there have been many studies on “computational consciousness,” or how something that might be considered conscious can be realized with computers, these studies are very preliminary and do not offer anything close to a concrete plan on building “conscious” machines. The reality is that we don’t have a widely accepted definition, let alone understanding, of consciousness. Claiming that we have already replicated such a nebulous concept with computers seems improbable at best. Granted, the claim could also be reasonable, if a particular definition of consciousness was specified as well. is the last sentence of this paragraph not a direct contradiction of the first? and look at the third sentence. what’s wrong with saying “we don’t understand enough about consciousness to make claims in either direction when it comes to our neural networks”? really: why do so many people in this article seem uncomfortable with other people saying as much? is it just the PR angle? is this field really less about answering the interesting questions than it is about satisfying the public?
- andirk 5y ago
  I think the issue is "AI" doesn't describe the field, making it misleading, as if the field will tackle the entire human experience. We can, however, change the definition of terms.
natch 5y ago
It may be that LeCun is not aware of all human created neural network architectures that exist. And even without that, it may be that “may be” provides an out that LeCun overlooked.
raymondh 5y ago
Phased locked loops are conscious. Whatever their goal, they constantly compare their actions with the external world, and constantly adapt their behavior. They are clearly self-aware and have complete OODA loop. Though some are simple organisms with only a few components; others implemented software are much more complex; perhaps, they even dream.
dade_ 5y ago
Studying ML has massively increased my appreciation for the intelligence in biology from cyanobacteria to mollusks, but rarely people on Twitter.
atoav 5y ago
Is a stone conscious if it's surface has formed in such a way it starts to solve interesting problems when water flows over it? You can laser etch neural nets into glas, so they can do typical ML-stuff like reading text — would such a piece of glas be "slightly conscious"? Maybe today's ML does something this examples do not, but someone needs to explain that difference to me first.
pmontra 5y ago
How do we measure consciousness? Without a clear definition and a measurement tool we can debate if WE are conscious at all. Once we agree on a definition we can start measure the consciousness of everything. Grass, phones, people. It's a minefield though. What if measuring people gives wildly different results for different people or the same person in different parts of the life or the day? Several types of distopia will follow. Beware of the definition and who backs it.
chronolitus 5y ago
I find this discussion on the topic to be of high quality (low noise, high signal) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oKYWbXioKaANATxKY/soares-tallinn-and-yudkowsky-discuss-agi-cognition https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oKYWbXioKaANATxKY/soares-tal... Personally I think that consciousness (as in qualia) is the narrowest and most useless definition by which we would judge whether a thing's inner experience is worth being valued and protected. If humans didn't have qualia, would that make it ok to be monsters to each other? No, the world would outwardly be the same, and so would morality. It's irrelevant whether chickens have qualia. They want to be alive, in the same way that you do, and their brains using v. similar processes. If you can dehumanize a chicken to make it ok to murder them, it won't be much harder to do the same for a (mentally deficient) human. If you want to live in a world where people are good to each other, you should pick a world where people are good to chicken, cows, chimps. And vice versa. Right now this is not the case for GPT-3, because its brain feels 'other'. But of course the substrate is irrelevant. If it ends up developing a consistent concept of 'self', and seeks to keep that 'self' in existence, it will become closer to the chicken, and morality will shift. Whether it has 'qualia' or that qualia can be related to ours is largely irrelevant. The teleportation thought experiment is another good one: Imagine a society where human teleportation is possible, and economically feasible. The one downside (which we the omnipotent storyteller know, but no in-world person can prove) is that it kills the 'you' in the qualia sense, and the person on the other side is the 'you' in every other sense (memories, desire, etc) except for qualia. Certainly people would be reluctant at first to use such a technology (me included), but that would put you at such a disadvantage compared to those who would use it (job prospects, more time, etc), such that over time most people would end up using it regularly. They would argue it's not that different from sleep, and you would be hard pressed to prove that consciousness is even lost. Arguably, it would become the norm to kill your consciousness and transfer your 'pattern' into a clone. It's not even that hard to imagine that reality as being absolutely mundane. This to me represents what is truly important to us, not 'qualia', but the continuity of a 'self' which benefits from past-me's work, and carries its thoughts, ideas, and desires into the future and potentially makes them into reality.
- webmaven 5y ago
  > Imagine a society where human teleportation is possible, and economically feasible. The one downside (which we the omnipotent storyteller know, but no in-world person can prove) is that it kills the 'you' in the qualia sense, and the person on the other side is the 'you' in every other sense (memories, desire, etc) except for qualia. How can there be a discontinuity in the qualia of consciousness that individuals themselves cannot discern by examining their own internal experience? What does 'qualia' even mean in that context?
tim333 5y ago
If you apply the same sort of standards you'd apply to a knocked out human to see if they were regaining signs of consciousness, then an awful lot of things would be conscious. Basically just some awareness of what's going on and some response to it. I think a lot of the debate is showing how special we are as other things are aware and respond but not in the special human way exactly.
narrator 5y ago
I'd like to offer a hypothesis for what consciousness is: I think consciousness is modulating some other dimension that we don't have a good definition for. Electrical signals migrating around in the brain in certain complex patterns perhaps do that. If we figured out how to do it, we could perhaps invent telepathic communication. Schizophrenia, where people hear voices and think they have multiple people in their brain, is probably two of these complex patterns going at the same time that are out of sync with each other due to some form of brain damage.

253 points by andreyk 5y ago

It's stretching credulity beyond the usual exaggerated hype associated with AI. What we have now is semi-OK forecasting at scale, nothing more. We (as in the researches, platform and technology) can get a system to select what looks to be a valid response to a host of stimuli, e.g., chess moves, patient diagnostics, vehicle driving etc. None of this "thinks for itself", nor is it remotely near to such levels of conscious self-awareness. I'm sick of this hype, it's been going on since the 1905's with hucksters promising robot household domestics, and all sorts of kooky weirdness that was swallowed up by the popular media.

csee 5y ago
The people who say it might be slightly conscious are just appealing to a functional, substrate-independent requirement for consciousness. I happen to agree with them that it's feasible and plausible. Let me ask you. If we invented an AGI that was as smart as us based on much larger nets (perhaps with one or two algorithmic tweaks on current approaches) trained on much more data, running on commodity hardware, would it be conscious? If yes, why can't our current nets be slightly conscious?
- new_guy 5y ago
  'slightly conscious' is just word salad, it doesn't actually mean anything.
  - csee 5y ago
    I am slightly conscious when I am extremely drunk and can barely think and feel, but yet still have some modicum of conscious experience. That's what it means. If you don't agree that consciousness exists on a spectrum, and instead think that something is either conscious or not, then simply replace the words 'slightly conscious' with 'conscious'.
    - tedunangst 5y ago
      But why would I want to put an extremely drunk computer in charge of making decisions?
      - csee 5y ago
        I was attempting to give an example of what a 'slightly conscious' state is to show that it isn't completely incoherent. Admittedly it was far from rigorous.
      - RHSman2 5y ago
        By far the best comment on here.
  - bondarchuk 5y ago
    You could say the same about "conscious" in general. There's not a single coherent definition of the word, not even in academic debates.
    - csee 5y ago
      There isn't, but the response to this lack of definition shouldn't be to simply terminate the discussion. We know it's probably a real thing because we experience it, and it's an extremely important open question whether an AGI on hardware will have "it" too. The answer to the question will have large ethical implications a few decades into the future. If they can suffer just like animals can, we really need to know that so we don't accidentally create a large amount of suffering. If they can't suffer, just like rocks probably can't, this doesn't have to be a concern of ours.
      - grumbel 5y ago
        The response to the lack of definition should be investigation into how that definition could look like, not arguing if we or something else has it or not. Without a definition and criteria to test you're never going to make progress.
        csee 5y ago
        Philosophers have been trying for decades to define it rigorously and have failed decisively. It really looks intractable at the moment. Given we are in this quagmire, I think it is ok to explore/discuss a bit further despite the shaky foundations of only having fuzzy definitions of "qualia" or "consciousness" to rely on.
        mannykannot 5y ago
        Quite a lot of the philosophical debate has been tied up in the effort to show that minds cannot be the result of purely physical processes or will never be explained as such, which does not tell us anything about what they are. We are not going to be able to say with any great precision what we are trying to say with the word 'consciousness' until we have more information. In lieu of that, what we can do is say what phenomena seem to be in need of explanations before we can compile a definition. At this point, opinions that human-level consciousness is either just more of what has been done so far, or cannot possibly be just that, are just opinions.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  There’s no evidence that neural nets can form an AGI so it’s a moot point. The AGI is an I’ll defined inflection point.
  - Galaxeblaffer 5y ago
    I'd consider brains and other biological neutral systems as neutral nets. So to me there's pretty convincing evidence that neutral nets can form an AGI
    - oneoff786 5y ago
      Well you shouldn’t. They are not the same. Brains are not (ML) neural networks. Neural networks are just a mathematical approximation of one part of how the mind works
      - Galaxeblaffer 5y ago
        I never ever said that the tiny approximation of subsets of our brain was enough for AGI. Just because we haven't found out the exact structures of the neural net in our brain and how to emulate it, it's still very much a neural net. It's just bigger and more complex than anything we can make our emulate yet.

chasing 5y ago

There are actual living things we have difficulty proving are "conscious" and you get into really tricky territory trying to establish what might be "conscious" (or even "alive") in the world even without bringing AI into the mix. Even the people around us we can't prove to be conscious except in that we are also human and assume they have a similar first-person (subjective) view of the world and aren't just a biological robot running equations. Yes, you could literally be the only conscious being in the universe and the universe would indistinguishable from one with many consciousnesses.

igorkraw 5y ago
Edit:Shoot, I meant to reply to another comment. Leaving this here and linking it --- IIT is the most coherent definition of consciousness I'm aware of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor... People dismiss it often, and it has valid academic criticisms, but most "lay" critiques I've seen seem to dismiss it because it gives things they don't consider to be "conscious like them" consciousness. I think in general, we overexagerate qualities that humans have as uniquely special and important (intelligence, sentience, consciousness), even if the definition of them is fuzzy and any non-fuzzy definition is "too inclusive". I wonder if this is because we are collectively Identity building and creating an "other" out of nature, because otherwise we'd 1. Be much less special as we want to fee 2. Would have to consider a lot of inconvenient externalities for our reasoning (moral and otherwise) to be consistent And both are slowdowns when you are bootstrapping a post scarcity society out of scarcity, so it'd culturally valuable to reify special qualities that we just determine "we" possess and "they" don't - because it's easier to unify on and allows more actions than making sure everyone can deal with the unfiltered reality of human... unremarkableness in an uncaring world, another social species like so many other with a temporary oligarchy on the planet (without wanting to drone to philosophically, I do think this aspect of Weltschmerz is underappreciated, especially seeing the anxiety amongst my peer group when the topic comes up)
- mannykannot 5y ago
  You have acknowledged that there are valid academic criticisms of IIT, and for those wanting to get an idea of what those might be, a good place to start is with Scott Aaronson's responses in his blog: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799 Note that the issue that you are concerned with here and the usefulness of IIT are separate concerns, and critics like Aaronson are not taking that position on the basis of the attitudes you claim are behind many 'lay' critiques.

bondarchuk 5y ago

I don't think "conscious" as a binary or scalar variable will ever be a coherent concept. "Raw" consciousness without content has never been demonstrated or even sensibly theorized. At the very least, we should add another term, that which the entity is conscious of. Then, I don't see why you would so vehemently deny that an image recognition net is conscious of the images it recognizes. Last I heard lobsters are supposed to be conscious and they only have about 100k neurons.

user3939382 5y ago

It's not just PR it's entire companies. I had a job interview with a guy who wanted me to do sales for his ML company and was bragging he had "AI" to predict who was going to win the Academy Awards. He had con-vinced someone with deep pockets that was going to work. If you go look at tech jobs on LinkedIn you see countless new companies with similar mud foundations that are somehow raising capital.

bonoboTP 5y ago
I believe the good experts are already distancing themselves from the AI term. It will backfire and will go out of fashion once again. There are important tools and skills in this space, but "AI" has been used more for deception than for clarity.

bonoboTP 5y ago

The whole discussion is pure fluff and a Twitter box match. You'll do yourself a favor by keeping all this noise out and concentrate on actually valuable books and writings. Any doofus and their cat can have an opinion on whether machines are conscious. We've been having this debate since Turing and even earlier. Also any time a Twitter storm comes up around AI, you will predictably have certain blocks building and flinging excrement at each other for various latent political disagreements. For Sutskever, it's a way to get into the news cycle, to get lots of engagement. Do you want to reward these? It's like Musk tweets. You can probably have more "impact" with a well optimized two-line off-hand tweet than with an actual book where you explain some novel idea.

visarga 5y ago
> Any doofus and their cat can have an opinion on whether machines are conscious. Please try a little bit to read the source before commenting. The originator of this opinion is Ilya Sutskever, co-founder at OpenAI and cited 269k times. He's one of the top people in the field. https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1491554478243258368 https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1491554478243258368 I take Ilya's tweet more like a musing, an invitation to think what if, rattling the box to get interesting reactions. In my opinion he's not necessarily right or wrong. Today's large neural networks might be conscious if they didn't lack some special equipment - a body, senses and action organs, and a goal. They need to be able to do causal interventions in the environment, not just reply to simple text inputs. I think embodiment is not out of reach. Look at Yann LeCun's strong reply: > Nope. Not even for true for small values of "slightly conscious" and large values of "large neural nets". I think you would need a particular kind of macro-architecture that none of the current networks possess. https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1492604977260412928 https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1492604977260412928 The neural nets need the 4Es of cognition: embodied, embedded, enacted and extended. > The four E’s of 4E cognition initialize its central claim: cognition does not occur exclusively inside the head, but is variously embodied , embedded, enacted, or extended by way of extra cranial processes and structures... they constitute a form of dynamic coupling, where the brain body world interaction links the three parts into an autonomous, self regulating system. (MJ Rowlands, The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology)

theferalrobot 5y ago

I feel like everyone taking a hardline stance on this is being disingenuous - consciousness as it is used in pop culture is a largely non-scientific (and in my opinion a useless) term. If you claim 'consciousness' is just an emergent phenomena of complexity (something I happen to agree with) then sure neural nets are potentially slightly conscious, but that isn't how most people view consciousness unfortunately. Most people view 'consciousness' as some 'pie in the sky' component of biological life that has yet to be discovered by science, but this line of inquiry is completely outside the realm of useful dialog, so it seems pointless to debate such things. These are the two general views of consciousness, the first at least provides a useful framework for discussion, but the two camps will vehemently always disagree with each other. > "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra

igorkraw 5y ago
I meant to reply to this comment since IIT is the main coherent treatment I've seen+my thoughts about why people habe this pie in the sky tendency https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30409369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30409369
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fsckboy 5y ago
"I think consciousness is just emergent from complexity, so what I have to say is valid, but people who suspect that's not the full story, well that's pointless to debate, they should use my framework for discussion" sheesh. weak.
- jjcon 5y ago
  It is pointless to debate with someone that invokes ideas outside the realm of scientific inquiry... that is definitionally true isn't it?
  - 5y ago

defenestration 5y ago

You can argue that consciousness has an important role in evolution. That creatures which are aware of their own existence have a greater chance of reproduction and survival. What if we create an AI and give it the goal of maximum reproduction, would it be more effective if it can 'think' about itself?

Veedrac 5y ago

So this article does not actually defend its claim, it just gets mad that some AI researcher expressed their opinion, makes an unsourced (albeit probably correct) claim that the criticized opinion is a minority position, and wishes really strongly that people would be less excited about this thing that they are not as excited about. Meanwhile in academic philosophy, it's totally OK to conjecture that, say, subatomic particles are ‘slightly conscious’ and nobody tries to tell them that they are not allowed to have an opinion. Here's a hint, if you want to refute an idea, refute the actual idea, don't just tell the person in so many words that they don't have the social status to say it. Yes this post wound me up a bit, how could you tell?

andreyk 5y ago
hmm, I am not sure this is a fair assessment, the portion on "Experts largely agree that current forms of AI are not conscious, in any sense of the word. " provides sources and a brief argument. Sure it's not a super long defense of the stance, but then again this is mostly an overview of what happened with all this twitter drama and not a full argument about this topic. Also, it outright states "Granted, the claim could also be reasonable, if a particular definition of consciousness was specified as well."
- jeffparsons 5y ago
  > "Experts largely agree that current forms of AI are not conscious, in any sense of the word." Experts in what? There _are_ no experts in consciousness, at least in the lay sense.
  - OneLeggedCat 5y ago
    Looks like you are getting downvoted, but it's true. Defining exactly what it is to be "conscious" is a nearly impossible problem to solve, even having spent your life studying it. I'm not personally even convinced that "cogito, ergo sum" is even correct.
    - 5y ago

danaris 5y ago

To be "conscious" in the sense that we generally understand it, any AI would need, at minimum, two things that are not commonly part of it. First, it needs to be continuously active and taking data input. Second, and closely related, it needs to be continuously learning. The neural nets we use today, in the main, are trained in one big lump, then fed discrete chunks of data to process. The neural nets themselves exist simply as static data on a disk somewhere. Some, I believe, have multiple training stages, but that's not at all the same thing as true continuity. I'm sure there are other aspects to being conscious, but I suspect that some of them, at least, are emergent behaviours, and I further suspect that they are mostly or all dependent upon these two.

The_rationalist 5y ago
[dead]

belval 5y ago

This is part of Microsoft and OpenAI marketing/branding strategy. Similar wording was used during the acquisition when OpenAI used "pre-AGI" in their press release: > Instead, we intend to license some of our pre-AGI technologies, with Microsoft becoming our preferred partner for commercializing them.* It's mostly arguing about semantics and it's fine and common in research circles. Sam Altman is pretty out of line with his comment saying LeCun lacks vision because he doesn't adhere to their hype (my opinion) based wording. Aside from that it's just business as usual, no need to stop every time academics argue. https://openai.com/blog/microsoft/?utm_source=angellist https://openai.com/blog/microsoft/?utm_source=angellist

bonoboTP 5y ago
In self-driving, I believe the Levels 1-5 helped define what people actually mean. I wonder if we could come up with such level definitions for AGI.
- kfarr 5y ago
  Yes, and perhaps analogous, the self driving levels help regulators, press, and general public differentiate between marketing puffery and substance.
- anonymoushn 5y ago
  The levels are helpful, but you still get companies saying they are "building a level 5 autonomous vehicle" and then telling you it only works in their geofence.

DantesKite 5y ago

The original tweet was very innocuous and seemed more like a thought experiment than a proclamation. Furthermore, nobody has come up with any conclusive evidence that the statement is incorrect. It's possible neural networks are slightly conscious, because we fundamentally do not understand what consciousness entails. If anybody can prove that statement is wrong, Nobel Prize to them.

bogwog 5y ago
> Furthermore, nobody has come up with any conclusive evidence that the statement is incorrect What would such evidence even look like?
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I think we can all agree that we don't know. The point isn't that the statement's probably correct or presumptively correct - it's that the original tweet wasn't intended as a statement of fact in the first place. "Accurate science communication" can't mean that researchers are required to formulate all their hypotheses in secret where nobody in the media might hear them.
bonoboTP 5y ago
You should consider the fact that the person who tweeted it works at a for-profit company, and this tweet is generating a lot of publicity for the company (case in point, us being here around the top of HN). It's naive to think it's just some innocuous random thought.
- DantesKite 5y ago
  The Oxford dictionary defines "innocuous" as "not harmful" or "offensive". In what way was his tweet harmful or offensive? Please be specific in your rebuttal. Here it is for posterity: "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious".
  - odonnellryan 5y ago

xiphias2 5y ago

AI researchers with huge salaries at huge companies are incentivized to hype what tasks machine learning can do while underestimating how centralized power it gives to the companies that have the infrastructure to train huge NNs. It doesn’t matter whether AI is conscious or not, only whether it’s centralizing or decentralizing power as it gets more powerful than human thinking (even if it’s not conscious).

skilled 5y ago

I mean, whatever the comments say here, it doesn't change the fact that news outlets pick up these kind of tweets and proclaim them as gospel.

jowday 5y ago

Discussions of “Consciousness” in the context of ML or AI research always seem to devolve into navel-gazing futurist pseudointellectualism. I don’t think it’s possible to have a meaningful conversation about something as ill defined as consciousness. This isn’t to malign the OpenAI researcher behind the original tweet - I just feel that AI researchers bringing up consciousnesses is a good signal to tune the conversation out. Bonus points if psychedelics are somehow brought up.

wallacoloo 5y ago
> Discussions of “Consciousness” in the context of ML or AI research always seem to devolve into navel-gazing futurist pseudointellectualism. it’s a hard problem. it’s been the realm of philosophy for a good deal of time; neuroscience sometimes touches it; then AI came rushing out of the blue and the question became about a hundred times more relevant. if you are strictly concerned with only your own well-being, you’re fine to ignore it. if you’re concerned with your pet cat’s well-being, even after seeing first-hand how differently they navigate the world, and their much more limited goals/volition, etc, then maybe there’s something worth digging into here: why concern yourself with the well-being of one biological machine but not of the well-being of the non-biological machine, especially as they converge in complexity over time? is there a justification for that, beyond just “it’s hard”?

burtonator 5y ago

dificilis 5y ago

"Conscious" is a word that has no objective scientific definition. It follows that "slightly conscious" is not well defined. In practice "conscious" just means "anything that thinks and makes decisions like I do". Also, nobody actually understands how their own brain works when they are thinking and deciding, which makes it very difficult for anyone to determine if some particular AI software thinks and decides the same way that their brain does those things.

xvilka 5y ago
Precisely! We cannot understand what consciousness is until we gain complete understanding of the human brain. Until that, we will have no AGI. Given the sheer complexity of the task, unlikely it will happen in this century.
- nnx 5y ago
  Don't think we can assume complete understanding of the human brain is a strict dependency. The first AGI might look and function nothing like a biological brain, perhaps not even inspired from biological brains, or very loosely. Like airplanes do not look and function like birds.

akomtu 5y ago

On this tired topic of origins of consciousness, I've heard an interesting statement that consciousness arises from life interacting with matter. Life by itself, an abstract life, wouldn't be able to do much or interact with anything. Matter by itself would be an amorphous substance sliding down to the lowest energy state possible. But when life interacts with matter, it sees itself in the mirror and consciousness arises.

antognini 5y ago

I highly encourage anyone who is interested in the subject to listen through John Searle's lectures on the philosophy of mind [1]. He taught a course at UC Berkeley on the subject for many years, and one of the years was recorded and uploaded to Youtube. He walks through the history of the subject from Descartes onward and spends a lot of time about how philosophers got very excited during the 1960s and 70s as computer science was just taking off because it seemed that at long last we had a new way to explain consciousness. This idea is that the brain is just a kind of computer and consciousness is just doing a certain kind of computation. If we wrote the right program and ran it on a sufficiently powerful computer, we could make other kind of computers conscious as well. But Searle is most famous for the Chinese Room thought experiment which is (in my opinion) a fairly decisive counterargument against this position. That, along with the What Mary Knew thought experiment and Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat together made the "consciousness is computation" position increasingly untenable. It took about 40 years, but by the time these lectures were recorded it seems that the tide has really turned among philosophers of mind (Searle has his own biases but he tries to be impartial in explaining all sides). At least among philosophers who specialize in the subject it's hard to find many who seriously believe that a GPU running Resnet is conscious. Obviously there's a whole semester's worth of material in those lectures and the arguments can't really be summed up in an HN comment, but anyone who is interested in thinking about these questions should really give the whole course a listen. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi7Va_4ekko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi7Va_4ekko

PartiallyTyped 5y ago
A Resnet is not conscious, but one could argue that an RL agent, by some definitions of consciousness, is conscious. If the measure of consciousness is the ability to have a subjective experience, then that requires that the object has an internal state that is modified, thus the same experience in different agents results in different modifications, ergo, it is subjective. If a requirement for conscious experience is the capacity for self reference, then Hofstadter has already argued that that can be achieved with very simple rules of inference and natural numbers. An RL agent that can plan ahead and take into consideration its own internal state could be argued to be conscious, by even stricter means that require that the agent is aware of its own existence. To me, it looks as if humanity is trying to find ways to argue that it is anything but meatware. But I guess accepting that we are just computational units implies that agency is not a thing, and humanity isn't ready for this conversation.

nonrandomstring 5y ago

Almost every post here explicitly distinguishes "Artificial Intelligence" from machine learning and advanced statistics, or at least avoids clumsily confusing the puff of marketing with what we really do as computer scientists. We all know better here, right? So why don't we robustly challenge it? As with the word "hacker" - which we've somewhat reclaimed - the fact that a misuse has entered common circulation is not sufficient reason to shrug and accept. Next time a marketing, media or recruitment type uses the words "AI". please take a moment and a little courage to politely correct them. If "AI" stays in Hollywood where it belongs it'll help ensure these emotive brouhahas are less common and we can get on with creating actual social value from code.

ipsum2 5y ago
There's no point in fighting linguistic drift. Language changes to be more imprecise over time as laymen pick up terminology and use it in a broader sense than initially defined.
bonoboTP 5y ago
Unfortunately, funding is often tied to playing into it a little. It's unfortunate, and a good balance must be found, but that's how it is. You see it in academia as more and more AI institutes pop up and AI master's degree programs are offered. This is no new phenomenon, though. You can read up on why Dynamic Programming and Linear Programming got called like that. Because "programming" was hot then, but optimization wasn't. And "dynamic" is a cool sounding word. That's all. Anyone who needs funding (whether in academia, in a startup, as a job seeker, or a promotion-seeker) needs to sell themselves. And some terms work, and those who are willing to use them will win. Again, a reasonable compromise must be found, but just like in sales, simply being a very honest vacuum cleaner salesman won't be a good strategy.

j45 5y ago

Another building issue is the disingenuous blurred use of concepts like AI to describe things that clearly aren't or don't need to be AI... I wonder if the early AI hype now might negatively affect crossing the chasm for future generations of AI that will be much more be the real deal.

The_rationalist 5y ago

spion 5y ago

This only shows that the social network + MSM combo is really out of control

an-allen 5y ago

Neural Networks are nothing but math. Zeros and ones manipulated by a CPU. There is nothing remotely conscious here. They are literally the product of linear algebra. If neural networks are even slightly conscious then that means every linear algebra equation is “slightly conscious”.

kfarr 5y ago
Human brains are nothing but atoms. Particles and energies manipulated by physics. There is nothing remotely conscious here. They are literally the product of a deterministic universe.
- grzm 5y ago
  Consciousness and free will are not the same concept.
tiborsaas 5y ago
Don't confuse the vehicle with the passenger. They are both heading towards same direction, but they are very different things.

zxcvbn4038 5y ago

AI is way overhyped, our current machine learning results in parlor tricks at best. My car still can’t drive itself. Microsoft is still waiting for a compiler that can make their code better. Google is still waiting for an AI to answer the phone. Facebook is still trying to teach Zuckerberg emotions. Youtube’s MI still deletes some poor person’s channel every week for no discernible reason. But we shouldn’t feel bad, didn’t it take the daleks three million years to conquer stairs?

wallacoloo 5y ago

> Experts largely agree that current forms of AI are not conscious, in any sense of the word. While there have been many studies on “computational consciousness,” or how something that might be considered conscious can be realized with computers, these studies are very preliminary and do not offer anything close to a concrete plan on building “conscious” machines. The reality is that we don’t have a widely accepted definition, let alone understanding, of consciousness. Claiming that we have already replicated such a nebulous concept with computers seems improbable at best. Granted, the claim could also be reasonable, if a particular definition of consciousness was specified as well. is the last sentence of this paragraph not a direct contradiction of the first? and look at the third sentence. what’s wrong with saying “we don’t understand enough about consciousness to make claims in either direction when it comes to our neural networks”? really: why do so many people in this article seem uncomfortable with other people saying as much? is it just the PR angle? is this field really less about answering the interesting questions than it is about satisfying the public?

andirk 5y ago
I think the issue is "AI" doesn't describe the field, making it misleading, as if the field will tackle the entire human experience. We can, however, change the definition of terms.

natch 5y ago

It may be that LeCun is not aware of all human created neural network architectures that exist. And even without that, it may be that “may be” provides an out that LeCun overlooked.

raymondh 5y ago

Phased locked loops are conscious. Whatever their goal, they constantly compare their actions with the external world, and constantly adapt their behavior. They are clearly self-aware and have complete OODA loop. Though some are simple organisms with only a few components; others implemented software are much more complex; perhaps, they even dream.

dade_ 5y ago

Studying ML has massively increased my appreciation for the intelligence in biology from cyanobacteria to mollusks, but rarely people on Twitter.

atoav 5y ago

Is a stone conscious if it's surface has formed in such a way it starts to solve interesting problems when water flows over it? You can laser etch neural nets into glas, so they can do typical ML-stuff like reading text — would such a piece of glas be "slightly conscious"? Maybe today's ML does something this examples do not, but someone needs to explain that difference to me first.

pmontra 5y ago

How do we measure consciousness? Without a clear definition and a measurement tool we can debate if WE are conscious at all. Once we agree on a definition we can start measure the consciousness of everything. Grass, phones, people. It's a minefield though. What if measuring people gives wildly different results for different people or the same person in different parts of the life or the day? Several types of distopia will follow. Beware of the definition and who backs it.

chronolitus 5y ago

I find this discussion on the topic to be of high quality (low noise, high signal) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oKYWbXioKaANATxKY/soares-tallinn-and-yudkowsky-discuss-agi-cognition https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oKYWbXioKaANATxKY/soares-tal... Personally I think that consciousness (as in qualia) is the narrowest and most useless definition by which we would judge whether a thing's inner experience is worth being valued and protected. If humans didn't have qualia, would that make it ok to be monsters to each other? No, the world would outwardly be the same, and so would morality. It's irrelevant whether chickens have qualia. They want to be alive, in the same way that you do, and their brains using v. similar processes. If you can dehumanize a chicken to make it ok to murder them, it won't be much harder to do the same for a (mentally deficient) human. If you want to live in a world where people are good to each other, you should pick a world where people are good to chicken, cows, chimps. And vice versa. Right now this is not the case for GPT-3, because its brain feels 'other'. But of course the substrate is irrelevant. If it ends up developing a consistent concept of 'self', and seeks to keep that 'self' in existence, it will become closer to the chicken, and morality will shift. Whether it has 'qualia' or that qualia can be related to ours is largely irrelevant. The teleportation thought experiment is another good one: Imagine a society where human teleportation is possible, and economically feasible. The one downside (which we the omnipotent storyteller know, but no in-world person can prove) is that it kills the 'you' in the qualia sense, and the person on the other side is the 'you' in every other sense (memories, desire, etc) except for qualia. Certainly people would be reluctant at first to use such a technology (me included), but that would put you at such a disadvantage compared to those who would use it (job prospects, more time, etc), such that over time most people would end up using it regularly. They would argue it's not that different from sleep, and you would be hard pressed to prove that consciousness is even lost. Arguably, it would become the norm to kill your consciousness and transfer your 'pattern' into a clone. It's not even that hard to imagine that reality as being absolutely mundane. This to me represents what is truly important to us, not 'qualia', but the continuity of a 'self' which benefits from past-me's work, and carries its thoughts, ideas, and desires into the future and potentially makes them into reality.

webmaven 5y ago
> Imagine a society where human teleportation is possible, and economically feasible. The one downside (which we the omnipotent storyteller know, but no in-world person can prove) is that it kills the 'you' in the qualia sense, and the person on the other side is the 'you' in every other sense (memories, desire, etc) except for qualia. How can there be a discontinuity in the qualia of consciousness that individuals themselves cannot discern by examining their own internal experience? What does 'qualia' even mean in that context?

tim333 5y ago

If you apply the same sort of standards you'd apply to a knocked out human to see if they were regaining signs of consciousness, then an awful lot of things would be conscious. Basically just some awareness of what's going on and some response to it. I think a lot of the debate is showing how special we are as other things are aware and respond but not in the special human way exactly.

narrator 5y ago

I'd like to offer a hypothesis for what consciousness is: I think consciousness is modulating some other dimension that we don't have a good definition for. Electrical signals migrating around in the brain in certain complex patterns perhaps do that. If we figured out how to do it, we could perhaps invent telepathic communication. Schizophrenia, where people hear voices and think they have multiple people in their brain, is probably two of these complex patterns going at the same time that are out of sync with each other due to some form of brain damage.